Amplats Trials World’s First Fuel Cell-Powered Electricity Grid

By Andre Janse van Vuuren -
Aug 5, 2014

Anglo American Platinum Ltd. (AMS) said it
is testing the world’s first fuel cell-driven grid in South
Africa as an alternative electricity source for remote areas
where expanding the national network would be too costly.

Amplats, as the world’s largest producer of platinum is
known, and Ballard Power Systems Inc. (BLD) will power 34 households
for a 12-month period with a prototype, which is fueled by
methanol and uses platinum group metals as catalysts, Chris Griffith, chief executive officer of the Johannesburg-based unit
of Anglo American Plc, said today at a presentation at the
Naledi Trust rural community near Kroonstad, about 200
kilometers (125 miles) south of Johannesburg.

The successful completion of this phase will see the
technology being rolled out “with a pilot test of 200 to 300
units in villages across rural South Africa by 2015,” the
country’s Deputy Minister of Mineral Resources Godfrey Oliphant
said at the presentation.

The system is designed to provide a total of 15 kW of fuel
cell-generated electric power and can supply as much as 70 kW
with the support of batteries,’’ Amplats said in an e-mailed
statement.

“The purpose of this trial is to validate technical and
operating requirements,” Andrew Hinkley, Amplats’s executive
head of marketing, said at the presentation. “This includes the
logistics of fuel delivery” and “the consumer’s electricity
utilization patterns.”

Amplats is also testing the use of platinum fuel cell-technology in mining equipment, Griffith said. Methanol-fuelled
systems are already used as a backup source of power on
telecommunications masts, said Karim Kassam, Burnaby, British
Columbia-based Ballard’s vice-president of business development.